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This paper introduces two methodological innovations for qualitative research. We apply these innovations to holistically understand youth peer cultures and improve participant-driven qualitative methodology.

It moves the methodological frontier forward by blending technology with the “go-along” approach used by ethnographers to prioritize participants’ perspectives and experiences within their socio-cultural contexts.

We introduce the youth-centered and participant-driven virtual tours, including a neighborhood tour using Google Maps designed to explore how youth navigate their socio-spatial environments (n = 64; 10–17 year-olds; 2013) and a social media tour designed to explore how youth navigate their networked publics (n = 50; 10–17 year-olds; 2013), both in relation to their local peer cultures.

Applicable to a wide range of research populations, the Google Maps tour and the social media tour give the qualitative researcher additional tools to conduct participant-driven research into youths’ socio-cultural worlds. These two innovations help to address challenges in youth research as well as qualitative research more broadly. We find, for example, that the “go-along” aspect of the virtual tour minimizes the perceived threat of the researcher’s adult status and brings youth participants’ perspectives and experiences to the center of inquiry in the study of local peer cultures.

Innovation project development is becoming more important in boosting competitiveness of universities and enterprises. It will not be possible to ensure rapid economic growth of enterprises without competitive innovations and without their introduction into education and business practice. The object of the research paper is innovations in teaching entrepreneurship. The subject of the research paper is analysis of the effective entrepreneurship education at the universities. The objective of the research paper is to study the integration process of technological business environment (TBE), intellectual capital (IC) formation, innovation project (IP) development at the universities and enterprises.

The tasks advanced in order to reach the objective: to identify the concept of IC, IP, the methodology of IP development at the universities, their main actions and methods; to carry out analysis of the TBE in Latvia, indicators characterizing it environment, the factors of TBE influencing IC, IP development at the universities and enterprises; to estimate the IP development as the teaching method at the universities and business practice in Latvia. The research period is from the year 2007 till the year 2020. This is the first research on the analysis of indicators of TBE influencing IC formation, IP development at the universities; the efficiency of involvement of academic staff in the formation of IC and IP development into entrepreneurship education in Latvia; definition of the IP development as the teaching method and presentation of its theoretical and practical interpretation.

This chapter focuses on the main challenges of teaching and learning European Union (EU) issues, bearing in mind that the future of the EU is far from being granted, the shock of Brexit, and the new technological innovations. The purpose is to design a methodology for teaching EU using knowledge management and design thinking procedures. Knowledge management refers to information selection, acquisition, integration, analysis and sharing knowledge that takes place in an environment dominated by social networks in which technological links play a major role. The design thinking procedures, as a collaborative methodology, create groups of students in the classroom. Each group should represent an EU member state. Once groups are created, the teacher must give them a task that may include a problem that the EU has had to solve during its history. Then, individual groups must be asked to design a solution. A consensus among all participating groups on the proposed solution should be reached. To design a solution, based on a mind map, groups should be working inside and outside the classroom using technological tools and interacting through social media. At the end of this process, students must play a Kahoot to fix and clarify the key concepts of each lesson. This process must be repeated for all the chapters of the EU syllabus. The syllabus is made up of key issues of the EU. Students should be taken to discover how EU affects their lives and to wonder how they would be without the EU.

Sociological studies of entrepreneurship focus on social and technical innovations in business. Using an illustration from molecular plant biology and the historical evolution of the term “entrepreneur,” I make a case for the theoretical and methodological importance of studying entrepreneurs and their ventures outside the scope of traditional business. Then, considering the scientific lab as a self-consciously entrepreneurial venture, I use the population of molecular biology labs studying the plant Arabidopsis thaliana to demonstrate a relationship less directly measurable among start-ups in business: diverse sources of funding accompany original activities and ideas within a venture. This is not, however, what predicts lab success. Lab size drives success, but hinders originality. Moreover, I show that established institutions in science are usually the ones that become innovations in business.

This chapter introduces the notion of the ‘Innovation Story’ as a methodological approach to public policy evaluation, which builds in greater opportunity for learning and reflexivity.

The Innovation Story is an adaptation of the case study approach and draws on participatory action research traditions. It is a structured narrative that describes a particular public policy innovation in the personalised contexts in which it is experienced by innovators. Its construction involves a discursive process through which involved actors tell their story, explain it to others, listen to their questions and co-construct knowledge of change together.

The approach was employed to elaborate five case studies of place-based leadership and public service innovation in the United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Mexico. The key findings are that spaces in which civic leaders come together from different ‘realms’ of leadership in a locality (community, business, professional managers and political leaders) can become innovation zones that foster inventive behaviour. Much depends on the quality of civic leadership, and its capacity to foster genuine dialogue and co-responsibility. This involves the evaluation seeking out influential ideas from below the level of strategic management, and documenting leadership activities of those who are skilled at ‘boundary crossing’ – for example, communicating between sectors.

The evaluator can be a key player in this process, as a convenor of safe spaces for actors to come together to discuss and deliberate before returning to practice. Our approach therefore argues for a particular awareness of the political nature of policy evaluation in terms of negotiating these spaces, and the need for politically engaged evaluators who are skilled in facilitating collective learning processes.

Technological advancement and the expansion of resources are key propellers of methodological innovations in scientific research. The virtual field is gradually occupying a larger space in scientific research, particularly regarding qualitative research. There are numerous tools that help in accessing the field of study, collecting data, recruiting of subjects, and providing support in processing and analyzing data. Low cost, time saving and access to otherwise inaccessible groups are the main potentialities pointed out in the literature. This chapter aims to enrich methodological discussions regarding information and communication technologies (ICTs), as well as to improve data collection methods mediated by ICTs used in qualitative research. Through a review of the body of literature on internet mediated research (IMR), production on the topic was characterized. The most widely used data collection methods are identified and discussed. Discussions originated from the review were broadened and deepened through contributions emerging from a study carried out by the authors. The results reinforce the contributions pointed out by the analyzed body of work and highlight the contextual, relational, and data validity dimensions. In an interconnected way, these dimensions allow for the production/obtaining data with specificities deriving from a new relation of individuals with time and space. Finally, attention is drawn to the idea that the background for methodological discussions about IMR is the same as the one for methodological discussions regarding science in its most different approaches – the demand for strong methodological, epistemological and ontological coherence.

This chapter derives from the movieDr. Strangelovecues for exploring questions about the quest for methodological insularity and purity in socio-legal research. Steven Lukes’ classic three-dimensional model of power provides an intellectual focus for the core exploration of relations between epistemology and data generation, the two key elements that we usually identify with methodology. The discussion culminates in an affirmative argument for the value of approaching methodology as jazz, the creative popular music that grounds reliable, humane sense in Kubrick's movie and provides an apt analogy for much of the leading scholarship in the LSA tradition.

Inspired by the debates on participatory methods and drawing from research on “digital childhoods” in Portugal, this chapter aims to address the methodological innovations and challenges in collecting visual and digital data with children at their homes. As one of the stages of a research project on internet use, children were asked to take photos of their favorite objects at home and to collect screenshots of their most used webpages, followed by a conversation with the researcher. The use of photography allowed children greater expression and autonomy and gave researchers access to the children’s own perspectives on their home environment. It also provided unique information about the arrangement of digital objects at home and their different appropriations by girls and boys. Screenshots showed creative uses of the internet by children and gender differences. Ethical concerns were raised, due to the specific nature of working with children and with visual material (anonymization and dissemination). Entering the domestic setting provided a privileged access to children’s private sphere and to the in situ observation of their use of technology. However, the home is not a neutral place for a researcher and crossing the border into the private domain involves risks. These findings, illustrated by empirical examples from the research field, stress the importance of reflecting on and discussing the potentials, limitations, and ethical considerations of different methodologies, as well as their suitability to specific research objects, subjects, and contexts.

Undoubtedly, digital transformation is permeating all domains of business and society. We envisage this volume as an opportunity to explore how manifestations of digital transformation require rethinking of our understanding and theorization of institutional processes. To achieve this goal, a collaborative forum of organization and management theory scholars and information systems researchers was developed to enrich and advance institutional theory approaches in understanding digital transformation. This volume’s contributions advance the three institutional perspectives. The first perspective, institutional logics, technological affordances and digital transformation, seeks to deepen our understanding of the pervasive and increasingly important relationship between technology and institutions. The second perspective, digital transformation, professional projects and new institutional agents, explores how existing professions respond to the introduction of digital technologies as well as the emergence of new professional projects and institutional agents in the wake of digital transformation. The third perspective, institutional infrastructure, field governance and digital transformation, inquires how new digital organizational forms, such as platforms, affect institutional fields, their infrastructure and thus their governance. For each of these perspectives, we outline an agenda for future research, complemented by a brief discussion of new research frontiers (i.e., digital work and sites of technological (re-)production; artificial intelligence (AI) and actorhood; digital transformation and grand challenges) and methodological reflections.